I deleted all my social media accounts years ago because social media made me anxious.
I can’t imagine the pain kids must be since they feel forced to participate in order to “socially” exist.
Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
241–250 of 366 posts
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#242Here's the paper: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-p... It's all correlational (observing that people with higher social media use are worse off in various ways). This approach is not capable of detecting reverse causation (people use social media more because they are unhappy) or third causes (something else causes people to both use more social media and also be unhappy)
that's what I thought when I read the article. > One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of primary school. That comparison doesn't support the hypothesis. It should have been compared to teenagers from 10 years ago. Otherwise, you can't rule out the effect of growing up on the mental health if these girls.
Anorexia was a thing before social media. So, yeah.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#243Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…
Many of those problems apply to any form of entertainment: movies, games, music, etc. I say we ban all forms of fun.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was just opioids or ampthetamines, alcohol or nocotine wouldn't be addictive, would it? Please don't use incomplete or irrelevant factoids when you contradict. But prediction of reward might very well be a concise description of the drive behind social media use.
>If it was just opioids or ampthetamines, Obviously it's not. I gave examples of two drugs and their direct mechanisms of action. >But prediction of reward might very well be a concise description of the drive behind social media use. No, that's a description of a living mammal brain. Addiction is when that system is hijacked directly , not when it is doing it's normal thing in response to stimuli.
Then why did you write up that precise phrase? You're upset about what I wrote, that much is obvious.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#245Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…
I generally dislike banning things because a few individuals can't handle it. Punishing those people that have self control seems ridiculous and I hate sin taxes for that reason. However, I think putting restrictions on stuff for younger people that don't have fully developed brains seems perfectly reasonable. If you're under 18 (21 in some cases) you cannot drink, smoke etc. Social Media should be treated the same w…
Wisconsin does not have a minimum drinking age.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.
There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.
> From providing self estem from a different source from the local.
The article explicitly covers this and shows a net negative. So saying there are positive effects isn’t very helpful as any gains are more than offset by negatives.
I think your argument is better through quantification. As I don’t think anyone is making the case that social media doesn’t have any benefits at all, the argument is that the negatives outweigh the benefits.
Of course, I think it’s easier to quantify the negatives than positives. How do I quantify the positive effect that offsets the probably correlated increase in preteen girl hospitalizations? [0]
[0] sorry trying to find the easiest citation for the graph in Lukiakoff and Haidt’s book Coddling of America’s Youth [1] https://livingonparr.wixsite.com/livingonparr/single-post/20...
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#247I think a problem with teenagers and social media is that they are often not mature enough to handle toxic elements on social media such as:
1. Trolling
2. Heated political discussions
3. Stalkers
4. Obsession with likes and doing negative behaviours to get likes
5. In general not knowing how to handle people
Social media should probably be banned for under 18
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#248Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…
Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upward…
>"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials."
I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate it, and wish it were drastically reduced.
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#249they said the same about video games, violent movies and music
And guess what, all those are now regulated (to an increasing degree).
Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose you're right. Lashing out is not a slow release of the pressure within that will save you from popping your balloon, it's the pop itself. Not all people have set up a structure in their lives that allow them to slowly release that pressure. We do not all have people in our lives that we can talk to about our feelings. Social media might help these folks. If I were to lash out at you during lunch or while we…
To take your analogy a little further: if we all started saying to someone who started lashing out online, "Hey dude, what's going on? You're acting irrational. Where's this anger coming from? What can I/we do to help?" would it subdue the flames and vitriol that exists on social media? Maybe. I don't know. It's worth a try. What I suspect would be better would be to pick up the phone and call that person and say tho…
@Zelphyr I feel refreshed by the way you humored me and my weird, half-baked ideas in this little sub thread.